Issues related to mobile multiplayer real-time games over wireless networks

Most recent released PC and console games offer multiplayer online support where players can compete or cooperate in real-time. However, very few games on mobile phones provide multiplayer support other than shared high score lists. This paper describes problems game developers have to face when developing real-time multiplayer games for mobile phones. Typical problems the developer has to deal with are incoherent representation of players´ positions, jagged player object movement, missing collision detection between player objects and background, and wrong or missing collision detection between player objects. The paper describes the mobile multiplayer real-time game BrickBlock, which was developed to investigate the performance issues related to multiplayer games played over the wireless networks. Further, we describe our approaches to solve network latency problems in the game, which made the game playable even over networks with high latency.